Why I Won’t Celebrate the Firing of Racists
Crystal Wilsey, a cashier at a Cinnabon franchise in Ashwaubenon, Wisconsin, said some unforgivable things to a Somali couple who had the temerity to request more caramel on a pecan cinnamon roll. But I don’t think she should have been summarily fired.
Wilsey’s is just the latest high-profile tale of an American who lost her job on account of a viral video. The racism she’s accused of is not debatable. In the TikTok video that circulated last week, Wilsey, a 43-year-old white woman, hurled a racist epithet at her customers and declared, “I am racist, and I’ll say it to the whole entire world.” She gestured to her crotch and added: “Suck it!”
According to the Somali couple, before the camera started rolling, Wilsey had called the woman’s hijab a “witchcraft bandana.” Wilsey alleges that the couple had been harassing her, but she has not provided any details to substantiate that claim.
When I saw the video, I naturally sympathized with the Somali couple. The slurs came at a time when Somali Americans are being persistently targeted in racist attacks from the right, including by President Donald Trump himself. And yet, as repugnant as Wilsey’s behavior was, I couldn’t help but consider that she was a single mother whose wages helped feed a child.
Cinnabon was quick to terminate Wilsey’s employment and declare that her actions didn’t reflect the “values of Cinnabon.” Progressives who abhor racism may applaud this move. But as a socialist, I can’t easily take the side of a billion-dollar corporation over that of an ordinary worker. (Cinnabon is owned by the Georgia-based conglomerate GoTo Foods, which also owns Auntie Anne’s, Schlotzsky’s, and many other brands popular in the South.)
Sure, Wilsey might not be a great fit for a customer-facing position. Her critics online also point to her long rap sheet, which includes charges of child endangerment, disorderly conduct, marijuana possession, and driving while intoxicated. We should nevertheless resist the urge to tell a simple moral story that celebrates someone losing their livelihood. That job at the shopping mall may be the bare minimum she needs to support herself.
[Jonathan Chait: The MAGA campaign to suppress dissent—even on the Right]
The lack of proper labor protections that allows for workers to lose their job over a single incident can cut in more than one direction. A Starbucks worker in Middletown, Ohio, was fired in September for writing “racists fav drink” on someone’s cup after they ordered a Mint Majesty tea with two honeys, reportedly Charlie Kirk’s order of choice. NPR documented numerous cases of people—schoolteachers, firefighters, military members—losing their job for sharing negative opinions of Kirk online following his assassination. A health-care employee in Kentucky lost her job in 2023 for using a racial slur in a comment to a Facebook group for a youth football league.
Not everyone is equally vulnerable to being fired on the basis of one-off accusations. In a high-profile 2018 case, Smith College disciplined a janitor for alleged racism toward a Black student, but a formal investigation found no evidence of wrongdoing on the janitor’s part. Two years later, the then-editor of British Vogue, Ghanian-born Edward Enninful, complained about being “racially profiled” by a security guard who asked him to enter the building where he worked through the loading bay. The guard was dismissed from the site in the midst of the pandemic and placed under investigation by his employer.
In each of these cases, the workers’ actions have carried a different moral valence—some repugnant, some careless, some ambiguous. But in all of them, an employer has presented a moral rationale for withdrawing a worker’s livelihood. Workers have too little legal protection against hasty or arbitrary decisions in this regard, and the public has gotten too comfortable responding with schadenfreude.
I am not arguing that all workers should have guaranteed jobs for life. Employees sometimes lose jobs for cause, such as when they fail to do assigned tasks or they endanger either their co-workers or their employer’s business. But the impulse to celebrate a worker’s firing is one we should check. Employers should be held rigorously to account for their reasons and procedures when they fire workers, even those who are guilty of repugnant acts such as hurling racist abuse or calling a customer “racist” because they ordered Kirk’s favorite drink. This is especially true in the United States, which lacks a strong social safety net. Losing a job can be catastrophic. In a better America, firing a worker would require an exhaustive process, including disciplinary action prior to dismissal, and involve representation by workers’ bodies. Such a process might still have ended by terminating Wilsey’s employment. In this better world, unemployed workers would also have the means to support themselves until they return to the workforce.
[Gillian B. White: Is being a white supremacist grounds for firing?]
Those of us on the left should be fighting to improve protections for workers of all races, and thereby for the betterment of people’s material conditions regardless of their views. Progressives should not write off any segment of the working class as beyond the pale. We should instead sow working-class solidarity as an antidote to the racial divisions the right cynically promotes.
Maybe I’m naive, or an incurable socialist. But I’d like to think that even if a worker is racist to my face, I’ll never ask for their dismissal. I’ll try instead to appeal to our common interest in improving the conditions of our lives.